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RECOMMENDED CDROM: "The Amateur Scientist," from Scientific American magazine. All 810 columns by C.L.Stong, Jearle Walker, Shawn Carlson. ~1000 amateur projects, pp2100. $24.99   Web amasci.com

12/03/2008

Video: Evil Santa's Workshop '08           more vids      future vids Dorkbot's mutant toys workshop, making give-aways for Santarchy's Santacon 2009. Barbies need octopus heads.

08/06/2008

Video: Dry ice music           more vids      future vids Dry ice CO2 gas pushes it instantly away from warm metal. Place it against a metal plate, and it howls. But the metal cools down and it stops. Here's a mechanical solution.

08/03/2008

Video: Make your own liquid nitrogen           more vids      future vids Dry ice and 99% rubbing alcohol form "poor man's liquid nitrogen," a cryo-liquid which instantly freezes flowers. Perform many LN2 demonstrations: quick-freeze fruit, rubber balls, etc.

 Newtons/M^2 = 0.5 * (3e6)^2 * 8.9e-12
             = 40.1 Nt/M^2
             = 10-3/4 lbs per square yard

08/03/2008

Video: Make your own liquid nitrogen           more vids      future vids Dry ice and 99% rubbing alcohol form "poor man's liquid nitrogen," a cryo-liquid which instantly freezes flowers. Perform many LN2 demonstrations: quick-freeze fruit, rubber balls, etc.

07/28/2008

Video: Traffic Jam           more vids      future vids It's fairly easy to erase part of the left-lane traffic jam on I-5 just south of Seattle. Sometimes a single driver can wipe out the whole thing.

07/14/2008

Video: Abrasion holograms           more vids      future vids I've made a few more videos: scratch holograms, magnet beads, Asian seed drink wind tunnel, soda/ultrasound fountain.

12/26/2007

Video: Melting glass in your microwave           more vids      future vids Here's an alternate version of a classic physics demo. Rather than heating up a glass rod and then plugging it in to 120VAC, we heat up a glass bottle and plug it in to a few hundred watts of 2.1GHz RF.

11/07/2007

Video: Ultra-simple Electric Generator           more vids      future vids A great idea for school science fair. Don't make a motor; everyone makes motors. MAKE A GENERATOR! Light a bulb.

08/22/2007

Video: Bare-hand Bottle Smash           more vids

08/25/2007

Video: Dry Ice: LEEEEETHALLY DAAAANGEROUS?!!!           more vids

08/11/2007

Video: Kitten Attaaaack!           more vids

04/06/2007

Video: Stupid Steady Cam Tricks #4: Outdoors, and "Star Wars"           more vids

07/01/2007

Video: Air Threads. I couldn't resist           more vids

INNER LIFE OF THE CELL Years ago one of my early morning visions involved weird EM resonance forces between biomolecules at hundreds of nanometers distances. If my delusions were true, then there must be a huge hole in modern biology, a hole almost as large as the one which would remain if the physics of chemical bonding had never been discovered. Without the long-range frequency-keyed electromagnetic bonding force, all sorts of nanomechanical phenomena in cell machinery would remain entirely unexplained. Now Harvard U. Media has a long animated movie of subcellular nanomachinery within leukocytes responding to tissue inflammation. Just as in my dream, all sorts of bizarre effects are unexplained: they're glossed over, or more frequently they're fudged by playing a motion sequence backwards (against the laws of thermo!) Specifically: HOW DO THE FRICKIN' ACTIN MOLECULES SELF-ASSEMBLE? The movie doesn't say. Instead they give us a picture of actin subunits magically pouring in from all directions and somehow finding the growing end. Uhhh... isn't that just an animation of depolymerisation and diffusion... but PLAYED BACKWARDS? Same with polymerization of tubulin: the subunits magically come running from great distances just so they can link up to the growing tubulin end. And these are just the most egregious examples. All through the movie there are molecules which somehow "know" where they're supposed to go, how they're supposed to rotate themselves, and they move with apparent intention over major distances. mRNA tips and ribosomes magically find the few rare membrane pores. Actin-snipping proteins both fly in from distances and also magically orient themselves through many degrees of freedom in order to bond to the fiber. Apparently the researchers are asking us to believe that all this happens by diffusion, by random tries and re-tries performed at high speeds. I got news for them: if you stick a padlock in a bag with a bunch of keys, you'll be shaking the bag a long time before one of the keys inserts itself. And in living systems, the bag should be filled mostly with quarters, with just a few keys, most of them not fitting that lock. And I thought *I* had delusions! But all this strange dishonesty will pop like a bubble if we admit the (possible) existence of a fairly simple thing: mechanical forces caused by AC electromagnetic fields in the nearfield regions between atoms and molecules having resonance lines at common frequencies. It's just attraction between electromagnets. But AC electromagnets. If their frequencies are different, they essentially don't recognize each other, and the net attraction becomes zero (well, it changes from attraction to AC vibration.) But if their frequencies are right ...or more likely a combination of different atomic frequencies in distant molecules are right ...then not only would the molecules pull together over relatively vast distances, but they would experience torques which twist them into proper positions. In other words, the unexplained "magically intelligent" motions of the macromolecules depicted in the above video might not be an exaggeration at all. They might be moved by electromechanical forces which act like simple computers communicating over hundreds of nanometers by coded radio signals.

09/28/2005

Added entries to Electricity FAQ, doorknob sparks, other stuff.

A moon that fell? As a kid in the 1960s I remember staring at the world map in the classroom and *knowing* that the Americas fit with Europe and Africa like a jigsaw puzzle. In 1965 this was geological heresy, but the grade school kids like me were seeing something real, something that professional geologists denied. So now I'm looking at the map of Mars over my desk, and I know enough to take my first impressions seriously. The Valles Marineris is too straight. WAY too straight. Well, actually it's curved in a sine wave on the map which extends as a discoloration across more than half the planet. (World maps with sine waves drawn on them are plots of orbiting spacecraft, where the angled circular orbit is "unrolled" to form a wave.) Also, Valles Marineris is aligned with the Martian equator, so it's also aligned with the plane of the ecliptic where moon orbits lie. Also, Valles Marineris has many widely separate parallel features which are also perfectly straight. Also there are all kinds of crater chains parallel to the valley all around the same region. Yet explanations of this valley talk about a cracking crust. I don't believe it. There are linear gouges and discoloration way downstream from the main valley. I predict that within a few decades the expert opinion will shift: Valles Marineris is an astrobleme, it was carved out by a moon that fell from orbit. The Valles region doesn't extend all the way around the planet, so it probably wasn't caused by a planetary ring. Imagine the event! It's even more impressive than those craters left by direct asteroid strikes. An entire moon gradually hits the top of the atmosphere and starts heating up from gas compression. If it survives for several orbits, its heat output will bake everything below, perhaps turning continent-wide deserts into glass and leaving a scar so large that the professionals will miss it when looking right at it. Then it breaks up into two or three huge chunks plus lots of rubble, into a hundred asteroids, which then descend and roll across the land at orbital velocity from horizon to horizon like incandescent bowling balls the size of Manhattan. Downrange of the main strike the air is full of big dirt: flying boulders the size of large buildings which rain down and ...disturb the surface.

09/11/2005

Added four MPEG videos to The Secret to Plasma Globes Without Vacuum Pumps.

09/07/2005

Added a new electricity misconception to the Electricity section.

Speed freak In his book "Surely You're Joking...", R. Feynman experimented with personal time sense, and he wondered what determines it. I think it might be social, not physiology. My first summer job was raking leaves on Elmira College campus, and it quickly became apparent that my normal rate of work was wrong. I did things much faster than the seasoned workers, and I attracted funny looks, so I adjusted my performance. I thought it was sort of stupid; why didn't everyone rake leaves normally instead of in slow motion? But slow raking was the "way you're supposed to do it," and anyone who strayed from the norm would encounter group pressure to slow down. But... that's how infants become people!!! We change behavior as we encounter immense nonverbal pressure from parents, friends, outsiders, etc., otherwise we'd all behave as one-year-olds even when adult. In different societies the standards are different; I've heard that tourists south of the border complain that everyone does everything slowly... and islanders complain about crazy Americans who are always rushing about. WHAT IF HUMAN TIME SENSE IS SOCIETALLY DETERMINED? I've experimented with this and find that it is. If I'm alone I can push myself to perform tasks much faster until until "faster" becomes habitual and unnoticed, but I get huge amounts of work done, and it takes forever for the clock to get to lunchtime. It feels like really waking up, at least until it starts being normal. Also, my usual body movements become tiring, and I find it's much easier to move in curves rather than starting/stopping the considerable mass of limbs. (Like switching to 'racewalk' rather than just speeding up my normal walk.) And when I tried it for days at a time, I started losing weight and had to eat extra meals. If I asked someone a question or tried conversing, their slow responses and slow thinking was quite irritating. But whenever I kept all this up in public, people responded badly. They seemed to be thinking "what's WRONG with that guy? What drug is HE on? Is he insane or something?" Bingo! That's the societal pressure which usually keeps its members living at the "proper" speed. It's the same as if I started acting like a 2-yr-old, or if I moved to a country where things happened at different speed: I'd encounter the same type of pressure to adapt. So... I wonder how far this can be pushed. Can we live at 5x normal? Will we get huge amounts of work done, then have a crash from "exhaustion of manic energy" or perhaps die prematurely of old age? Or go the other route and let the outer world speed up to 5x faster while we stay "the same."

08/15/2005

More about nanobacteria in the biology section. (This is a fairly exciting controversy!) Suppose that when a bacterium splits in half, each half takes half the genome. If the two bacteria remained together, they could trade metabolic molecules and survive. Suppose they split into two, four, eight, etc. If this slowly happened over millenia, we could end up with species of bacteria smaller than viruses, where each cell isn't viable alone since they act as specialized organs of a colony. Wouldn't just such an evolutionary trick be the result of a deep underground nano-crevice environment and evolution pressure favoring smallness?

AMPERES VARIES MAGNET? Random thoughts: if you pass a current through a bar magnet, it should create extremely instense circular fields inside. After all, the path surrounding the current is a closed loop of iron, and a low current should saturate the material. But wouldn't this path be disrupted if the current fell? The axial field of the permanent magnet would take over. Apply a weak AC to the bar magnet and create immense pulses of internal b-field. Are these detectable? Instead perhaps pass a cable through a narrow iron pipe to give the pipe internal circular flux patterns. Apply AC to the axial cable and look for pulses. Perhaps wrap a coil around the pipe to apply a bias. More randomness. In the Vasserfadden demo below, how thin could the water thread become? I should think that e-field forces would cause it to resist evaporation, as with electric ice needles. The water filament would be like an electret. But if the thread broke, would it contract to form a droplet, or would the e-field preserve its threadlike form? If it stayed threadlike, this means we could build a network, an aerogel, from nothing but water. The threads would be maintained by the strong e-field (unless closed loops of electrified water filaments are also stable, so the external field could be removed.) An electrically-stablized aerogel made from water vapor would possibly explain the observation of invisible wall phenomena.

07/25/2005

More old stuff: The Wasserfadden experiment and Giant natural water-thread?

Check out this discussion thread on tesla coils forum about x-ray tubes and powering entire homes and cars with wireless. And here's another one about Bob Golka, arc welders and ball lightning.

07/16/2005

An old article never listed here: Mother and daughter detect plasma-spheres through walls

Don't miss SEATTLE WEIRD GENIUS REAL SCIENCE 2005, the 'science fair' in bldg #30 at Sand Point, Saturday July 16. I'll have a demo table there with microwave oven, Tesla coil, and bowl of argon gas. Remember Plasma Globes without vacuum? Getting ready for the above event; I executed some microwave oven mayhem at Wednesday's Seattle Outsider Artist Project: Dorkbot Mad Science night. New high voltage effects discovered! A microwave oven with nothing inside is a 2.5GHz high voltage source. A bag or balloon of pure Argon usually does nothing... unless you include a tiny fragment of carbon fiber. After the plasma outbreak, the glowing violet-white cloud will grow and grow, melting the bag, then crawling all around looking for every last scrap of argon left in the wilting glob of plastic. Argon inside a glass bowl was similar: when triggered by a speck of carbon fiber, it exploded into a radial burst of wiggling lightning. This was a first: it was normal-looking mini-lightning, but at 2.5GHz frequency! As soon as the argon heated up, the spark-brush turned into a bright fuzzy cloud which rose to the top of the bowl and melted holes in the plastic plate laying across the opening. With a bigger bowl we actually saw some spherical lightning: a small spark at the bottom of the bowl became a 2" glowing hemisphere which rapidly rose, becoming more and more spherical before being distrupted by the plastic plate.

06/26/2005

Many new entries can be found on the Brain Modification Page

When you drop a dish, usually it bounces once. Then it shatters on the second bounce. After noticing this effect I started listening for it. Sure enough, in restaurants (etc.), when you hear a plate go "DONGGGGG" when it hits, it usually goes "smash/tinkle" during the second bounce. I FIGURED IT OUT! When the dish hits the first time, it bounces upwards, but it also starts wobbling fiercely. It rings like a bell, and the vibrating edges of the dish are probably moving at several hundred miles per hour. [NO THEY'RE NOT! It's like a spring, and the edge can only move as fast as the plate was moving when it struck. When it comes back down, the wobbling edge could hit at twice the plate's velocity at most.] Now "view the movie in slow motion." The edge of the dish is going in-out-in-out as the dish slowly falls towards the floor. When it arrives, the wobbling edge whacks the floor again and again and again... and it hits at such high speed that it seems like the dish fell from 100ft altitude [wrong, it will seem as if the plate fell from *twice* the altitude of the bounce], not the two feet it fell after the bounce. My conclusion: if you grab for a falling dish but you're not fast enough, don't give up. You have a good chance of either catching it after the first bounce ...or even just *touching* it briefly which will damp out the intense vibrations that usually make the dish explode on contact with the floor.

06/21/2005

"Spirit Orb Photographs" made with water mist, dry ice frost clouds, fumed silica, etc. I find that a parallel grid of human hair w/separation around 0.5mm on camera lens will cast shadows, essentially drawing lines on each false ghost-orb. If your camera had a hexagonal iris, the "orbs" would all be little hexagons.

SHOOT PLASMA BOLTS FROM FINGERTIPS! This one was a brainstorm during Dorkbot Tesla Night at COCA gallery in Seattle. Get a tank of argon plus regulator, a glass vase or bowl, some hose, and an aquarium airstone. In a draft-free room, slowly fill the vase with cool dense argon. Argon is different than air or CO2: it supports immensely long electric sparks. Poke the end of your Violet Wand or Tesla coil into the argon pool and watch the huge flaming white streamers spew forth. Now for the next part. Ready? Place the HV electrode against the outside of the glass, then stick your hand inside. Blazing white plasma streamers spew from your fingertips! Feels like being poked by needles. Make a fist (it stings less!) Next trick: a larger bowl, one which my head fits within. Yes, I wanna become the central electrode in a "plasma globe" device. Shouldn't be too painful unless the arcs shoot from my eyeballs...

06/15/2005

Supermagnet bead tricks. Buy a big wad of 1/4" supermagnet spheres (~$.50 each.) Make buckyballs, mysterious spinners, DNA chains, etc. (I really need to add photos to these!)

05/27/2005

Added spam buster to Main amasci guestbook. Now you can see your entries instantly, not weeks later.

WAVE-MOTION COLA Put some crushed ice in a translucent or transparent cup. Fill it half way with dark cola (the kind with sugar.) Then fill it the rest of the way with diet 7-up or diet lemonade (or even water.) The ice will distrupt the stream, keeping the two layers from mixing very much. You end up with dark cola at the bottom, and clear stuff at the top. (Sugar is denser.) If you tilt the cup back and forth, you can make slow-motion waves in the cola! Even if the pizza place doesn't have see-thru cups, you can still use the trick. First add ice, then fill half way with full-sugar drink, then fill it up with diet drink. This creates two layers. You can drink the diet Coke first, leaving the layer of non-diet Sprite for later. Just remember to add the diet drink second, and use a thick layer of ice to disrupt the stream.

Idea for future hoaxes: leave messages on the cardboard tube inside toilet paper rolls. It's not so difficult to remove the tube if you bend it. Write a message, or even apply a professional looking sticker. Or perhaps carry around a rubber stamp made for just this purpose. "HELP, I AM BEING HELD PRISONER IN THIS SCOTT FACTORY." Or "HERE IS THE SECRET PHONE NUMBER, DO YOU DARE TO DIAL IT?" Put several copies on the same tube so it's hard to miss. Or even cause total amazement by wrapping a dollar bill around the thing. Reinstall the tube and put the roll back on the holder.

05/01/2005

Added better 3D diagrams to In electric circuits, WHERE does the energy flow?

04/21/2005

Is this thing a blog? I'm not constantly adding interesting links to other sites as bloggers are supposed to (those kinds of links are mostly on coolsci , wpage, and weird art, also stumble.) OK, how about this. Here's the Skeptic versus Woo-woo fight reduced to it's essentials: mung cartoon A, and mung cartoon B . Also hundreds of others.

04/16/2005

Added months of messages to the Main Guestbook

04/10/2005

Added: When I die, I wanna be...

03/25/2005

I built a Large art device. Eighty four tesla coils driving 84 fluorescent tubes. It was up at COCA gallery this March (Seattle,) and is going to be at Bumbershoot, Sept 2-5.

03/24/2005

Added The $1 Tesla Coil

The DC electric motor was invented by accident! Huh. I totally missed this fact in my schooling. Michael Faraday demonstrated the "motor" effect in the early years, but like Ben Franklin's electrostatic motors, it was only a lab curiousity. Volta's "pile" caused power supplies to become all the rage in science labs, and by the mid 1800s, several types of DC electric generators or "dynamos" were already in use as power supplies. So people were generating voltage with rotating coils and commutators. Then during an inventors' exhibition at Vienna in 1873, inventor Z. Gramme accidentally connected a steam-driven dynamo to a second similar unit, and to everyone's surprise the second one started spinning as a motor. Thus the modern multi-HP electric motor was "invented." We add the DC motor to the list of other accidental discoveries: Becquerel's radioactivity, Roentgen's x-rays, the Leyden capacitor, Oersted's electromagnets, etc.

02/21/2005

Added Determining Charge Polarity to Static Electric page

02/09/2005

Wow! I had a "Vanishing Object" experience while stirring my coffee. Scary.

Ant trails at work. A narrow stream of black ants is flowing across my lab bench, up the side of a water bottle, into the squirt-tube and down inside. They're harvesting distilled water?!! The trail is coming from the floor, up the side of a box, across the top edge of some papers standing on edge, then up the voltmeter wires which happen to dangle over the edge of the tabletop. Following the trail backwards, I find that it goes about a HUNDRED AND TWENTY FEET back to the Mass Spectrometry lab at the end of the hall! It disappears under a fume hood. There must be several thousand ants in the trail. I guess the Chem. building ant nest must be hard up for water. I brush away ants and create a 3ft gap by cleaning away their scent trail with alcohol. But an hour later the gap has closed again. Ants trapped on the far side of the gap apparently find their way across. Playing with ant trails! I move the water bottle, but then the arriving ants start spreading all over the desk. So I give the ant colony a wet cookie (placed 120ft away near the origin of the trail.) If the ants are a signal in an optical fiber, then the cookie should act like an impedance mismatch; reflecting the outbound ants back to the nest. Sure enough, after an hour the ant stream decreases greatly. I brush the remaining ants onto the floor and disrupt their scent trail. But in the morning it has re-formed, this time traveling up to an old bottle of Moxie Cola with a tiny bit of dried syrup in the bottom. They're still using the edge of the papers in the box on the floor, this time crawling up another test lead, transferring to the power cable of the oscilloscope, then up to the shelf with the bottle. OK, this time I convert the entire "ant-flow optical fiber" into a Bragg mirror: I drip some sugar water at many places along the 120ft trail. Quickly the stream of ants at my end of the trail has dropped to zero. Hmmm: pranking possibilites. If I put a tiny bit of sugar water on a victim's desk, and also deposit a blob of ants, won't a few ants find their way back to the nest and create a new 120ft stream?

12/29/2004

Update (large) to Science Misconceptions Comment Book

12/28/2004

Small addition to "Time-flow Distortion Sensor"

Another brainstorm! It's crackpot physics time. Remember Pyramid Power? The original claim was that a cardboard pyramid could sharpen a disposable double-edge razor blade. While reading an " Uncle Al" physics note about laser ultra-black beam-dumps composed of stacks of hundreds of standard razors, suddenly several concepts aligned in my brain. First concept: Uncle Al notes that the blackness of the razor-stack can be compromised by knocking the arrayed razor edges against even a soft object. Second concept: by stropping an old-fashioned straight-razor, we do not sharpen it, instead we straighten the bent-over micro-edge of the hard steel. The very tip of the sharp edge becomes folded over with use, and abrading it on a soft surface will grab the edge and bent it straight. Third concept: What if Pyramid Power was genuine after all, but it was actually triggering some sort of memory-metal effect? Not sharpening the blade, but essentially it would spontaneously "strop" a razor blade? Fourth concept: shine a bright LED at a slightly damaged razor-stack beam-dump and use a photodiode to measure any slow changes in the return reflection. Spontaneous blade-straightening would now be measurable. Stick the thing in a pyramid overnight (perhaps with power turned off, if that has any effect.) See if you can detect any auto-stropping effects!

12/20/2004

Have you met The Krampus? Santa Claus has an evil assistant who punishes bad children. He's a demon from ancient pagan solstice celebrations.

A great mystery within microwave ovens: WHY DOES THE TURNTABLE SOMETIMES ROTATE BACKWARDS? I always wondered about this. The obvious explanation is that the turntable motor is a 60Hz synchronous induction motor. But why? Synchronous motors aren't as good as the normal kind. One thing might make sense: it forces your turntable to end up in the same position as it started. That way your coffee mug will be at the front, or the handles on the cassarole dish will be positioned correctly. But my microwave oven doesn't do this. Most of the time the mug ends up in a crazy position. Testing is required. I heated a mug of tea at work for a minute, and for the first time I actually watched the clock as the turntable rotated. AHA! IT ROTATES ONCE EVERY TEN SECONDS!!!! I verified the effect and it does work: as long as you punch in multiples of 10 seconds, your food will come back to its original position. But something's screwy. My oven at home doesn't do this, yet its turntable randomly starts off clockwise or CCW, so it must contain a synchro motor. So I timed the oven at home. Bingo: it rotates every 20 seconds. That explains everything. At home, if I punch in 30 seconds, or 10 seconds, then the turntable rotates an extra half turn, putting the soup bowl on the opposite side. Not to smart. How many people cook things for 20 seconds, or 40 seconds? A 3RPM turntable speed only works if you cook something for one minute. But now that I know about the problem, I can start only using multiples of 20 seconds.

12/15/2004

Added more to Science Toys, and Weird Links

I'm playing with a UV keychain LED light. It's not very deep UV (400nM). More like violet. But it will make your teeth glow green, and your fillings are easy to see (I mean the white non-metal ones.) Fluorescing aqueous humor gives you some green pupils! I see little flecks of green all over my arm: fungus? Yep. The thick edges of my heel fluoresce green as well. Huh, what else are these things good for? They will light up the plastic strip inside $5 US dollar bills. They will charge up some ZnS "Glow In The Dark" plastic to very high phosphorescence. Ah, if you draw all over yourself with yellow-green Hi-lighter markers, the UV keychain flashlight makes the invisible lines light up brightly. Draw some finger bones.

12/3/2004

The toolbar from the Stumbleupon service is addictive. TOO addictive.

I'm having fun with a perl command: global search/replace all files in a unix directory. Throughout the whole amasci.com site I've changed all the www.amasci.com addresses into amasci.com, changed all my email addresses into GIF images (harder for spam spiders to read 'em,) and other such things. Here's the single-line unix command syntax below. perl -pi -e 's/www.amasci.com/amasci.com/i' *.html It's easy to cause trouble if you mess with such things. You'd be lucky not to destroy all your files with a single command. Better first download your whole site to offline storage!

12/2/2004

Added real Site Statistics Try clicking on some referring URLs

I stumbled across a new food. I feel like the discoverer of yogurt must have felt: disgusted, but not adverse to putting weird things in their mouth. I'd purchased some eggplants, and they were in the fridge for a couple of weeks along with some button mushrooms. When I finally got around to inspecting them, one was still OK, but the other one had a large brown spot several inches across. Strange, there was a mushroom stuck to the eggplant in the middle of the brown region. It was merged. The mushroom mycelia were still alive, and they were trying to absorb the eggplant! The brown region was somewhat soft, and when I tore the eggplant skin, the hole smelled like mushrooms. I returned the eggplantmushroom organism back to the fridge. A few days later I checked again and found that the entire eggplant had been assimilated. It was soft and mushroom-smelly within. Resistance was futile. Now I have to try sticking mushrooms against all sorts of different vegetables and see what results. Can mushrooms take over cold salmon? Since the storebought mushrooms are Agaricus Bisporus, we could call the process "Bis-porizing." I also need to try actually cooking one of these mutant beasts. Hmmm. What would happen if you fell into a coma while lying on a mushroom? You'd wake up all brown and mushroomy? With an unstoppable desire to hide inside a compost pile?

11/28/2004

Ideas for a gallery installation: Demented Pushbuttons

11/26/2004

I learned a new word: Pyrrhonian skepticism

10/18/2004

Added The width of a coulomb to "Speed of Electricity"

Sometimes my subconscious delivers fully-formed visions in answer to questions from years ago. Today's vision: AC Kelvin water-drop generator. Half of a Kelvin electrostatic generator could be placed in the exhaust of a jet engine and produce megavolts at milliamps! There's more. I have a La Violette idea of military aircraft covered with Barium Titanate or perhaps PZT ceramic. How weird. Why PZT sheath? Ah, it's Jean Louis Naudin's "plasma sheet" idea where sonic booms can be eliminated by covering the airplane wings with a glow-discharge. But why use insulating ferroelectric? Well, I know that long dielectric filaments can act as "wires" for high frequency AC (the "right angle circuitry" idea.) If JL Naudin replaced his plastic covered hi-volt wires with PZT-encased wires, he'd still get purple plasma even if his operating frequency was greatly reduced. (Barium titanate acts almost like a metal conductor, as long as you use AC.) BINGO! Drive the Kelvin water-drop "inductor" electrode with slowly changing polarity, and your megavolts output will slowly change polarity also. With a jet engine driving it, how fast could this polarity change be made? Maybe raise it to a few hundred Hz? Without the PZT your metal aircraft would spew lightning bolts. But with the PZT layer, the whole thing would develop a sheet of plasma. It might even absorb radar pulses at the same time it modifies the transonic shock wave fluidics. Whew. It all hangs together and makes some kind of sense. I couldn't assemble the ideas piece-by-piece intentionally. They just pop up when I'm half dazed.

10/10/2004

Added Seeing Sound, an untested idea involving mirrors, strobes, and razor blades

A new traffic-wave phenomenon: the infinitely large traffic jam! I need to add this to Traffic Waves. The "infinite jam" occurs whenever a traffic wave stops moving backwards and instead becomes pinned to a certain point on the highway. It happens when each driver in the jam must sloooooowly crawl past the "pinning point" before accelerating freely again. A cop car by the roadside can cause this. So can a bridge crest or blind curve. In other words, the trailing edge of a traffic wave stops evaporating normally... yet its leading edge still grows as before, since more cars are piling on from behind. The region of solidly-packed traffic grows larger and larger with nothing to halt its growth. HOWEVER... if a single driver can pull the edge of the wave back away from the pinning point, then the wave begins moving again. The edge of the jam begins evaporating normally, and cars which pass the former pinning point have no reason to slow down (i.e. the "pinning" effect only occurs if a slow dense traffic-wave goes past.) Once un-pinned, the huge jam stops growing. It doesn't dissipate, but if it had yet to grow enormous, one driver can nip the gigantic traffic jam in the bud. It only takes one car to unplug one lane. In Seattle we have at least three of these continously-growing jams: the bridge crest on I-5 at the ship-canal bridge, and on 520 at the bridge crest just before the Lake Washington floating brige, and on I-5 North near the Senaca St. exit where cars exit into the express lanes. I've also seen these on 520 many times, where a cop has pulled someone over, causing a two-mile traffic jam to form (people won't roar off into the empty roadway if a cop is right there, so they drive many yards past before peeling out... so the wave remains pinned, and the backup grows enormous.)

10/11/2004

Finding some old files never linked here: 2D "gravity" sensor, also detects e-fields and strong magnets Plasma/aerogel life forms in our atmosphere Fringe Science and breakthroughs

I was imagining crowds of people walking on city sidewalks, versus crowds driving on highways. The atmosphere is totally different. Our cars act as our masks, making us anonymous. (Well, some of us make tatoos with spraycans and stickers.) But while commuting, we're silenced and cannot talk (or even communicate) with everyone around us. Hmmm. Maybe I could build myself a voice? How about an ultra-powerful broadband comb-frequency FM transmitter which could override nearby car radios regardless of which station they're tuned to? Too much work. Brainstorm! Cellphones. An experiment for the daring: print out a large bumper-sticker on adhesive paper and stick it on the rear of your car. (Cover it with clear tape to waterproof the paper.) The sticker reads: DRIVER'S CELLPHONE 425-222-4321 (use your real cell number.) What will happen? Death threats from road-ragers? Random members of the opposite sex hitting on you? Do you dare to find out? It might actually be interesting, since all those thousands of drivers on the highway near you have absolutely no way to send messages to anyone around them... except to you.

09/12/2004

Added "Reality Detector Goggles" to Misc Screwy Ideas

09/12/2004

I've been volunteering at Seattle's new UFO/Bigfoot museum.

09/12/2004

Added more to Childhood Brain Modification, and Toys

Idea for "Orbs" believers. "Orbs" are bright sphere- or disk-objects that show up when photographing cemetaries, haunted houses, etc. But many of these are simply the photoflash-illuminated dust motes or mist droplets hanging a few inches in front of the camera. The circular "orb shape" is a blurred image of a bright dot, and the shape is determined by the camera iris edge. If your camera iris is circular, the "orb" will appear as a disk, but if the iris is octagonal, the orb will look like an octagon. Ooo, idea! To settle the matter, place an opaque object on your camera lens! E.g. stick a thin slice of black electric tape across the lens. Or even make an "X shape" from thin tape slices. Now whenever you photograph a bright, small, blurred object such as a dust mote, the dark strips of tape will show up in the bright circular "orb image." On the other hand, if the "orb" is real, and is large and distant from the camera, you'll see no shadow-image of the opaque tape cutting across the "orb." Presto: any possible "orbs" can be instantly separated from the dust-mote images; the real orbs won't have a big fuzzy "X" across them. Also see some more ghost hunting suggestions.

08/27/2004

Adding more to Why Airfoils Are Hard To Understand

08/26/2004

Hey, should I start using some blog software, so passerbys can comment on these entries and turn this into an entire forum? The "slashdot of science?"

07/22/2004

Working on: What is laser "coherence? (VERY under construction)

I never really understood laser "coherence." While working on science museum exhibits, I found that books were full of mistaken explanations. Over the years I've noticed that even the advanced textbooks get it wrong. They talk as if laser coherence is caused by stimulated emission. Nope. The laser-medium amplifies light. But if you give it some incoherent light, it will only amplify it while preserving the incoherence. But then why do lasers emit coherent light? I finally figured it out. It's because the laser mirrors cause the laser to behave as a near-perfect "point source." As light bounces between the mirrors, any light which doesn't seem to come from a single tiny point will eventually wander away and be lost off the edge of the mirrors, while any light which DOES come from one tiny point will keep bouncing and be amplified. Get two parallel mirrors and look into the "infinite tunnel." Only light that comes from the distant "infinite" point will avoid crashing into the walls of the tunnel. (How many physicists or even laser researchers know that laser coherence is caused by the laser cavity? Textbooks teach that it's caused by individual atoms, by "in-phase emission!)

07/17/2004

Added Complaints of suppression are not Conspiracy Theories

07/13/2004

Massive ISP server crash, things being restored from backups

07/12/2004

Added Bigger Better Balls, M. Crowley's paper on easy ball-lightning , also Easiest Ball Lightning Yet

07/12/2004

Added lots more "things" to Childhood Brain Modification tricks page

07/09/2004

Added a GIF anim, a Fake Live Webcam

WSCI: Demented idea, INBOX POETRY: send a string of blank WSCI: messages where the subject lines form a poem to be WSCI: read directly from their inbox without opening any WSCI: email. Send them slowly, otherwise the vagarities WSCI: of web traffic will jumble the order... but not TOO WSCI: slowly, or every other line will be the subject line WSCI: from some spam message. OOOoooo! Design the lines WSCI: of the poem to be read in ANY order, then send 'em all WSCI: in one glob and let the net have it's way with 'em. WSCI: Internet Haiku is born!

07/05/2004

Animated background-GIFs are possible? Oh the humanity.

We live in a free country? Well, I personally know two science people who've been raided in the last five years. One was invaded by the local cops because they decided that his home lab was a "crack lab." Another was raided by the FBI after they decided he was a child pornographer. They of course found nothing at all in either case. And in past years the state of California tried to make it illegal for individuals to own chemistry glassware. And now the guy below is hassled for having biology lab equipment at home. This crap is DANGEROUS. I'm not very political, but I know exactly who is the poster-child for the highly ignorant "dark forces" pouring fecal matter on the US constitution. I advise any science-hobby people in the USA to think very carefully about this trend before casting votes in the upcoming election. Consider writing your elected official. So few people do this, that if you decide to write, your voice will have an unusually large impact.

BAD NEWS: FBI GOES AFTER A SCIENCE-ARTIST | Cops tackle, cuff scientist for being in woods Forum | WIRED story | CSM Article | TV coverage Defense fund | More news | "Free Range Grain"

-----------------

I just bought my own overhead projector. Apparently Boeing engineers are ditching all of theirs, so they're only $25 at Boeing Surplus warehouse in Seattle; (more for the fancy collapsible portable versions.) In the past at very small conferences I've had problems because they'll set up video for laptops, yet balk at tracking down an overhead. I've always wanted one of my own. Some evolution: Dirt and a pointy stick (isn't it all we could ever want?) Clay tablet (well, it does have "save." Lacks instant-erase) Napkin (for restaurants lacking dirt floors) Chalkboard (good for audiences above 5 members) Dry-erase whiteboard (less messy than chalk) Overhead projector (for huge audiences) Powerpoint (huh! wtf! CANNOT DRAW ANYTHING?!!! ) Powerpoint: twenty thousand years of technical advancement has given us a "chalkboard" where nobody can draw sketches or schematics while thinking out loud, or while answering audience questions. Yet NOBODY NOTICED?!!! GAH!!!!! Powerpoint is a computer-based slide projector, and cannot replace overhead viewgraphs or even chalkboards. I shudder to think what the next stage could be. And I'm even more convinced that guys like "The Iceman" with their woven grass backpacks and wickedly sharp flint weaponry were the peak of advancement, while everything afterwards has been slow creeping unnoticed degradation. :)

05/15/2004

More shameless self promotion: here's my only invention for sale: Visible Electricity, sold by Arbor Scientific

05/09/2004

Slapped together a tiny site for Seattle Outsider Artist Project S.O.A.P.

05/04/2004

I'm making a Seattle Links page. Abnormal resources.

05/08/2004

Moved microwave pyrex lava to Unwise Experiments

Friday, time for another Weird Science Salon, the monthly meetings at my place in Seattle. But after all these years they've finally grown too large for this small livingroom. Tonight's meeting will be at Seattle's new UFO museum, the Museum of the Mysteries, on Broadway in the the Capitol Hill region. 730PM to midnight. The usual bulk-purchase stuff will be for sale: supermagnets, levitation graphite, ferrofluid samples, scihobb bumper stickers, copper Lenz-law tubes, 7,500Vdc power supplies, etc.

05/07/2004

Added a bit to Physics Sermon #49

04/26/2004

Old article, never linked here: The Research Game

04/10/2004

New addition to mental derangement page

03/22/2004

Added On defeating shyness

03/22/2004

Added Nipple Cola

03/16/2004

The Network54 free web-forum service has unethical features: some of their popup ads take over your IE browser and install a new default homepage; an advertisement.

03/15/2004

Heh. Traffic in the year 2050, another traffic animation :)

03/03/2004  Holy creeping Capitalism Batman! It's the end of an era.  Sci. Hobbyist 
            now has BANNER ADS.  But wait, there's more!  The ads
            are run by Google, there's no graphics, and the products are
            somewhat chosen via the website keywords: science toys, kits,
            high voltage devices, etc.  I'm putting most of them along the
            site edge like ads in a magazine.  Comments?  Is google an evil 
            giant corporation?  Not just yet.  We'll see...

03/01/2004  Our group got some publicity in Seattle Times (back in Sept)
            Here's the photo that went with the above.

02/17/2004  A talking creepy billb head made by Sandra P.  RATS!!!  the 
            Hanes veepers site is now dead.    Try this one instead.
            Or this Al Jarry head talking in his infamous monosyllables.

   Huh.   If you search Google for keyword "microwave oven," guess which
   site is right at the top of the list?

   NEWS FLASH: Molten lava in your microwave oven!  I had a piece of 
   volcanic glass from a science store, so I perched it on the end of a 
   vertical metal cylinder placed in my microwave, heated it to a dull red 
   glow with a propane torch, then turned on the oven for several minutes.  
   A hotspot appeared on the obsidian, grew bright, then moved to the
   interior. After awhile the obsidian fragment glowed red again and the
   surface softened and cracked open, revealing a brightly glowing yellow
   interior which started flowing outwards.  Mini lava flow!  When cooled, 
   I found that the hottest part of the melted obsidian had foamed up and
   turned white.  Pumice!  Creating pumice in your kitchen from home-made 
   molten lava.  Apparently this obsidian is full of dissolved gasses, so
   it must have originally cooled while still underground (under pressure) 
   where it couldn't turn into pumice or into an ash cloud.  Note that I 
   only succeeded after removing the glass platter from the oven.  With no 
   other big absorbers in the oven, the platter was eating all the watts.

   OLDER: trying to melt pumice in a microwave oven.  It does glow
   orange when nuked (pre-heat with propane to trigger the effect.)  But 
   only the sharp edges soften.  Next to try: changing ash from Mt. St. 
   Helens back into lava again.

   EVEN OLDER: microwave ovens can melt glass, but only if the glass is 
   first pre-heated to dull red heat.  I melted a hole in the side of a 
   bottle by nuking it, after first heating up a small spot with a 
   plumber's torch.  I had to stop it after 60 seconds or the stream of 
   liquid glass might touch and shatter the rotating glass platter.
   The bottle shattered during cooling, so wear goggles!

11/12/2003  Added more to Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments: FAQ

10/27/2003  SCIAM SCIENCE PROJECTS ARE BACK!  I fixed the links on sciam1.html 
                 so they now point to backup copies at archive.org

   Igor says repeat this loudly over and over until your IQ drops significantly:
   LITTLE TINY HEAD. NO ROOM FOR BRAIN!  Little TINY head. NO room for BRANE...

10/24/2003  Found some more interesting toys

   Sometimes at a boring party you'll find some helium balloons used as 
   decorations.  You task is to release them from bondage.  Fly!  Be free!  
   But sitting against the ceiling is not freedom.  So, collect carrot 
   sticks and celery from the food trays, tie a hunk to each balloon, trim 
   down their strings to a minimum, then carefully nibble down the hanging
   vegetable until the balloon neither falls nor rises.  Leave it hanging 
   in air, and it will float annoyingly around on the air currents, or 
   perhaps be attracted to the back of various hair-dos by electrostatic 
   forces (especially if you've thoroughly rubbed the entire surfaces of 
   each balloon against your arm-hair before letting it loose.)  OK, Dr. 
   Von Fronk-en-steen, now combine several mylar balloons to make a single
   monster duct-tape zero-gee asteroid!  (See link below)

10/22/2003  Added Antigrav Boulder.  Your pet asteroid drifts around the house.

   The Rijke tube" is a very strange device.  Jam some metal screen 
   into one end of a metal pipe, hold it vertically with the screen end
   downwards, and heat the screen with a flame.  The thing starts loudly 
   howling.  The gentle convection-breeze with the hot screen acts as an 
   audio amplifier.  The howl is feedback (a longer tube makes a lower 
   tone.)  Brainstorm: inject helium or CO2 into the lower end to change 
   the tone.  Send it a sequence of gasses and it will change your gas-data 
   stream into music.  Or be boring, and just add a telescoping pipe to 
   create a Thermal Trombone.

09/30/2003  Added an Excel numerical toy, a pulse-wave crawling along a power line.


   Poor man's liquid nitrogen:  chunks of dry ice in an insulated
   container of rubbing alcohol.  Amazingly enough, many of the things you
   can do with liquid nitrogen are associated with its great thermal
   coupling power.  It's a liquid, so it touches the entire surface of any 
   object dipped within.  Dry ice is cold, and SEEMS to work poorly, so most
   people assume that this is because it's only -110F, not -320F.  Wrong.  
   It's because dry ice is not a liquid, and any object stuck into a dry 
   ice container is insulated by the layer of gas.  It cools down, but only 
   very slowly.  So, use dry ice chunks to chill some alcohol!  Then try 
   freezing and shattering a rose or a rubber band.  Make springs and chimes 
   out of solder or lead sheets.  Dip an operating LED into the stuff and 
   watch it grow intensely bright.  Some supermarkets carry dry ice (such
   as QFC in Seattle.)  Or check your yellow pages.  A buck a pound.

09/22/03 Added a separate Comment Book to Electricity Questions page

    As a kid I tried to grow crystals using table salt.  But first I made
    a big jar of salt solution so the white stuff would settle out
    (salt is normally full of anti-caking agent.)   But then, my salt 
    solution ESCAPED!  It crawled out and made a run for freedom.  You
    see, salt grows crust, but the crust is wet with concentrated salt
    solution.  So then the crust grows crust.  And more crust grows on
    that.  Within a matter of hours your jar of salt solution can grow
    crust on the glass which extends up the side and over the lip, and 
    then the wet crust becomes a siphon.  If the humidity is low, the
    salt water crawls out and forms a large pool on the floor, leaving a 
    mysteriously empty jar.   Hey, maybe this explains how battery acid
    can escape from your car battery and form those big white crusty 
    things on the battery terminals.


08/01/03  Always adding more to Weird Links, non-science

    People spend years learning to sound just like Jimmy Stewart or Elvis.  
    Why not do something far more useful: do impressions of YOURSELF, but
    a version of yourself who has a trachea full of Helium.  Make tapes of 
    yourself on helium, then learn to speak the same way but without any 
    helium.  Get several others together and go on the road... "Barbershop 
    Faux Helium Singers."  Maybe do some Mitch Miller numbers.

07/22/03  Added PFI, a local Seattle legend, gourmet food warehouse store.

07/18/03  Added Fingernails on blackboard, explained!

    Hey, that "threadlike electric wind" phenomenon from 1998 won the 
    Nobel prize last year.  Dr. J. Fenn uses it to make a row of micro droplets 
    each with protein molecules inside, then evaporates the water, leaving a 
    "beam" of charged proteins which can be accelerated in a vacuum chamber and 
    their mass determined.  "Electrospray ion-trap mass spectrometry."  The
    tiny droplets can travel at tens of MPH through the air apparently because 
    they behave like a moving column, not like individual droplets.  Nikola 
    Tesla wanted to use liquid mercury electrospray micro-droplets accelerated
    by a 100 Megavolt VandeGraaff machine.  He claimed that it was an effective
     weapon over many kilometers.  Like a water-jet cutter, but with a much 
    smaller and denser "blade."

06/10/03  Adding more to How Transistors REALLY work.  Also a short version.

     If escalators are driven by standard AC motors, then as more and more
     people pile onto the descending escalator, finally the current phase 
     will reverse and energy will be dumped into the power grid.  The
     esclator's induction motor becomes a generator!   The escalator lowers 
     all those heavy flesh hunks, and the energy has to go somewhere.  If you 
     want to make a small donation to a company whose building has 
     escalators, then walk up the stairs, but ride the escalator down.

06/05/03  Experimenting with cyborg text brain implants: the RSVP speed-reading
          protocol.  It's like text-to-speech software, but aimed at your
          retinas rather than ears.  Disable your eyes' muscles and pour the 
          text directly into your brain at high speed.  Here are three examples 
          done in GIF animation:  slow, fast, faster.
          See Speeder reader museum exhibit.

06/04/03  Making The Ice which does not Melt

05/24/03  At long last added an actual biology section.

05/24/03  Added Human IR sense detects hail? to the 'weird sci.'
          section.  It's subjective and might not be real, so I didn't put
          it under 'amateur sci.'

      Sheep mowing your lawn?  Forget it!  You'd have to build a barn for 'em
      and clean up the sheep poop.  BRAINSTORM: plant your whole yard with
      catnip, and let the neighborhood cats keep it trimmed.   Actually 
      this might even work.  I noticed that at the end of winter my flowerpot 
      of catnip on the front porch wasn't regrowing, yet the stump had many
      tiny leaves.  I put a cage over it and within a day there were large
      green shoots taking off.  Neighborhood cats had kept it trimmed way back. 

05/20/03  Added to misconception list: a Lemon Battery can't light a bulb.
          This classic school science experiment actually doesn't work.  It never 
          did.  Fortunately there are other things you can do with a lemon 
          battery. Also, if you have a supercapacitor, then you can cheat.

04/18/03  Found old article:  making square wheels
          Anyone with some machine shop skills should try making a set of
          these things.  They look really cool when made in gleaming polished
          acrylic.  Stick them on a little axel and they'll roll smooth 
          and silently across a glass tabletop... yet they're CUBES.  The 
          tetrahedron version looks almost as odd.

     Where's the dividing line between "site update news" and "Blog"?  
     Have I injected sufficient humorous comments to qualify?


03/30/03  Added OK, how do wings REALLY work to the Airfoil mistake section

02/11/03  Updated hoaxes page with "Radioactive Nightmare"
          Also "megavolt body charger."   Make yourself into a human 
          VandeGraaff generator.  Use laying-on-of-hands to perform anti-
          healing ceremonies on cellphones and laptops.


       The word of the day is "Serrodyne."   I've heard of Heterodyne and 
       even Superheterodyne, but "Serrodyne" is a new one on me.  How could
       I have missed it?  Simple: it's very recent.  Also it's very 
       weird: change an incoming high-freq signal's frequency by using 
       Doppler shift!  Then just add your frequency-shifted signal to 
       the original, and then a nonlinear detector will give you a nice 
       low-freq signal at the difference frequency.  Hobbyists take note:
       it lets you treat a light signal as if it were a radio channel.
       Split any laser into several different frequencies, then put 
       separate data streams on each!
          
       For a microwave signal, just pipe it through a TWT (Travelling 
       Wave Tube) while constantly increasing the drive voltage on the 
       electron beam.  For a light signal, just constantly move one end 
       of an optical fiber (or instead wrap the fiber around a cylinder 
       of piezo material and then constantly increase the cylinder 
       diameter.)  This shifts the frequency by a constant value.  Mix 
       it with the original, shine it on a photodiode, and you've 
       moved a piece of the optical spectrum down into the radio 
       spectrum!   Pretty cool, eh?   Serrodyne lets you treat light
       as if it were radio frequency.

       Of course you can't keep up the constant change forever, and that's
       where the "Serro" part comes in.  Just move things in a sawtooth wave.
       Give your optical fiber constant drift in order to create doppler 
       shift, but every so often jump it back to the start.  Except for 
       those brief jumps, the signal frequency will end up shifted.  In 
       other words, you've created "Serrated heterodyne."

02/07/03  Updated misconceptions list with why do clouds float?
          Clouds DON'T stay up there because the droplets are small, or
          because they're so light that existing updrafts can lift them.  
          They stay up there because the air inside the cloud is warm.
          Oh, and why is the sky blue?  Simple answer, but not one I've
          ever seen in any book.

12/28/02  Added Drawing Holograms By Hand (2003), presented at SPIE Imaging conference.
          I actually submitted a paper to a science journal.  It's just
          a conference proceedings, but still.    Last thing I "published"
          was around 1980 as a coauthor on an instrumentation design for
          vision studies.

09/03/02  Added IR filter-goggles, $10
          These really do work.  Greenery in the landscape looks very weird.
          They let you see right through certain types of black IR filter.
          Be careful though, it might not be wise to use them without good 
          solid UV protection.

06/12/02  Added Dishonest Argument section to Closedminded Science
          During the next flamewar you can point out all your opponents'
          illegal ploys.  Or not.  "Never argue with an idiot.  They just
          drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience."

06/07/02  Added more to Electricity Misconceptions

05/07/02  Added  Local Seattle Tech Jobs
          During job-search I couldn't find a good Seattle jobs portal with
          all these company pages.  So I made a primitive one.

05/07/02  Writing Ridiculed Discoverers, a list
          Aimed at those people who are certain that scientific concensus
          never makes mistakes, certain that crazy claims in science are 
          never proved valid in later decades.

04/28/02  Added more to Skeptic Fallacies: They Laughed at the Wright Brothers
          Three very common arguments I constantly encounter in online 
          Skeptic forums.

04/28/02  Found an old article of mine: Watts, Ohms, Volts, and Amps
          Two things flow in wires: charge and energy...  but they are 
          deeply interconnected via voltage and Ohm's law.

04/23/02  Updated the High-voltage diodes and coil-winding page

02/23/02  Sorted the UNUSUAL PHENOMENA archive

02/08/02  Added some ebay sections to Electronics Hobbyist

11/17/01  Merged the english text into  Grebennikov insect-antigrav book chapter
          Best crackpot article I've ever seen!  It has all the earmarks of 
          a genuine discovery.  That, or the guy spins a very believable 
          tale.  Biological nanostructures which harness undiscovered 
          elements of gravitational physics!  Since he kept the "antigrav" 
          insect species name secret, we'll never know if it was real.

10/30/01  Fixed up weird newsgroups

08/20/01  Added Brief testing of the Morton Effect
          I couldn't reproduce his claims.  But then later I realized that 
          my VDG machine has the wrong polarity.  I'll have to take it 
          apart someday and reverse the rollers.

08/16/01  Update to carbon-to-iron experiment
          Alchemy!  heresy!  Striking an arc between big carbon blocks
          apparently creates a form of stainless steel, but without the
          usual problem of "radioactive grad students" or even 
          incandescent chickens.

08/11/01  Added How do Transistors Work?
          No, how do they REALLY work.  What if we don't trust textbooks, 
          but instead figure out the physics from first principles?  This 
          is the "Babylonian" method espoused by Feynman (as opposed to 
          the Euclidian math-worshipping method used by contemporary 
          science.)

08/09/01  Old article: "Bions, leukocytes, and floaters"
          Wilhelm Reich's "orgone energy" is partly based on a misperception;
          strange wigglers in the environment are actually inside your eye.

07/05/01  Added GIF diagrams to Tesla's Greatest Mistake
          He used the Earth as a giant waveguide for 5KHz power transmission.

05/30/01  Got Adobe Atmosphere? (free!)  Try FREUDIAN
          Ever wanted to try building 3D objects?  Or wondered whether the www 
          of the future will be holographic?  Get in on the ground floor!  The 
          free beta software lets you make complicated 3D objects and then 
          publish them on the web as 3D 'worlds.'   Make your own online science 
          museum or sculpture gallery.  Best of all, there's a realtime chat 
          server, and your users can see each other!

04/07/01  Playing with Adobe's Virtual Reality beta plugin & worlds

04/04/01  Added entries to Electricity Misconceptions

03/20/01  Added a CUPPA BURNING PLASMA to  microwave demos
          Your microwave oven can create a pool of fluorescent gas.  Poke at it 
          quantum mechanically with salt grains.  It gets fiercely hot though, 
          and can shatter your Pyrex glassware.

03/18/01  Added a graph of leakage for a small gravcap test (no thrust!)

03/04/01  Added a couple of GIF drawings to INLINE KELVIN'S THUNDERSTORM
          Make high voltage with no moving parts except dribbling water.

01/30/01  Added Ultra-simple hovercraft plans.
          These blower-driven plates can lift immense weights.  We piled on as 
          many kids as would fit, yet the darned things still glided along.

01/28/01  Added photos to BEHAVIOR INSTRUCTIONS  Skull awareness!
          Slowly, ever slowly my text-only prejudice is eroding...

01/25/01  Added more answers to My Answers at Madsci

01/05/01  Tesla's Shade whispers: "Coupled Oscillators."   OoooooOOoo.
          The last wisps of summertime visionary experience still stun.

02/17/00  More Energy Suction [LINK WAS BAD]
          What can yuh do with a drunken photon?

12/25/00  Added Energy: a property?  Or a substance?

12/22/00  Added FPD: Newsgroup flaming as  mental illness

12/18/00  Added crude diagrams to Capacitor Complaints

12/10/00  Added WHERE in the circuit does energy flow? (lots o' pictures!)

11/20/00  Added Right Angle Circuitry

11/14/00  Added animation to Flight Analogy

11/11/00  Added more to Interesting Toys

07/22/00  Added Airfoil Explanations

07/22/00  Added an exerpt from TEXTBOOKS FLUNK OUT

06/30/00  Added 'Squealing wall' laser demonstration

06/27/00  Added Subtle Energy as structured white-noise

06/01/00  Sorted the UNUSUAL PHENOMENA archive

05/13/00  Added Smoke Ring Animation

03/31/00  FOOD FOR THOUGHT: How can long EM waves be sent through a tiny hole?

03/25/00  New report of a success with "gravity capacitor".  To follow 
          the discussion, see escribe.  To see how to subscribe to this 
          forum, see the FREENRG-L page.

03/25/00  Added Pure Horganism to Closeminded Science section

03/16/00  Major "energy-sucking antenna" debate on the SCI.PHYSICS.ELECTROMAG
          and the SCI.ELECTRONICS.DESIGN newsgroups caused me to add
          this simplified analysis of the "small resonant antenna"
          phenomenon.

03/07/00 Added a new page: INTERESTING TOYS

02/20/00 A freeware "traffic waves" screensaver sent to me. (.SCR for MS-WIN)

02/17/00 More Energy Suction

12/30/99 Added more stuff to What Is Electricity? and FAQ

11/16/99 Added an animation to traffic experiments

10/26/99 Added High-speed blimp-vortex, a silly idea.

 9/25/99 Added WHO REALLY INVENTED "LEVITRON?"&

 9/25/99 Added Levitron& and dishonesty

 09/20/99 Added Nerd/Misfit Resources and Don't blow up your school

 09/18/99 Added Cognitive Processes and Science-suppression

 09/17/99 Added Crackpot Theory the 3rd: "Invisible Wall" acoustic effect

 09/08/99 Added Crackpot Theory the 2nd: Energy-sucking Quantum Electrodynamics

 09/08/99 Added VDG WEIRDNESS: The Morton Effect

 09/01/99 Added WEIRD STUFF: anti-chirp scalar wave for Star Trek 'force field'

 09/01/99 Added Publicize inventions via "infection"

 09/01/99 Added UPDATE: Vector-potential free-energy device idea!

 08/29/99 Added My first crackpot theory: vector-potential energy source

 07/30/99 Added Energy-sucking radio antennas

 06/27/99 Added Tesla's Big Mistake

 06/15/99 Added Benveniste's "water memory" send over wires

 05/28/99 Started a new discussion group for Amateur Science: SCICLUB-LIST

 05/17/99 Boston Globe article: TEXTBOOKS FLUNK OUT

 05/13/99 Added Exploding Coffee Water to Microwave oven page

 05/13/99 Old file that I never put on miscons page: Capacitor Complaint

 04/14/99 Started an Electricity FAQ [UNDER CONST.]

 04/12/99 More about What is Voltage [STILL UNDER CONST.]

 03/30/99 Added Electricity is not a form of energy!

 03/25/99 Added The difference between "current" and "static"

 02/25/99 Added Evolution Heresy

 02/15/99 Updated Ion Experiments (untried, suggested experiments.)

 02/05/99 Added "Static Electric" means "HIGH VOLTAGE"

 02/05/99 Worked on FAQ: Why I'm involved in Fringe Science.

 02/04/00 Added Weird science IS perception.

 02/02/99 Added LINKS: The Amateur Scientist column at SciAm magazine

 01/31/99 Added Physics Sermon

 01/30/99 Added more "abhorrence" to Abhorrent ideas in Science

 01/22/99 Added What a Shocking career!

 01/21/99 Added Fringe-sci and Crackpots and Breakthroughs, Oh My!

 01/18/99 Added a couple of Torsion-waves papers to Spin Waves page.

 12/26/98 Added hardware diagram to "Electrostatic Air Threads" page.

 12/20/98 New DOMAIN NAME: http://amasci.com = http:/www. amasci. com/

  Just remember "AMASCI".  No more of that "eskimo ,dot, com, slash,
  tilde... you know, *tilde*, the spanish "enya," that little squiggle
  thing, the one over the backwards apostrophe key? OK? ..then billb, with
  two L's, NO, NOT billD, billB, with a "B" as in "boy,"  ...etc.

 12/14/98 Added Commercial sources links page for electrostatic generators

 12/07/98 Fixed up THE END OF SCIENCE

 12/06/98 Added 'Gotchas', antigravity experimental artifacts

 12/03/98 Late notice: added FREE STUFF for teachers links

 11/28/98 Added PARASCIENCE VS. PSEUDOSCIENCE

 11/27/98 Broke my Quotes Collection loose from Closeminded

 11/26/98 Added Feynman book links to Feynman Page

 11/26/98 Addition to Audio Illusion

 11/25/98 Added WEIRD NEWSGROUPS

 11/08/98 Added ALT.SCI.AMATEUR

 10/28/98 Sorted the UNUSUAL PHENOMENA archive

 10/25/98 Weeded dead links & organized Electronics Hobbyist page

  10/8/98 Added newsgroup links to sci. ed. groups, sci. amateur groups, 
          and homeschooling page

  9/24/98 Added Skeptics Links page to WEIRD SCIENCE

  9/13/98 Added AIP Misconceptions List to the Miscon Page

  7/13/98 Added TRAFFIC EXPERIMENTS

  7/8/98 Added TRAFFIC JAM CURE

  6/27/98 Added You'll go Blind!

  6/18/98 Added a Site Map (this is a big site, eh?  Large, even.)

  6/5/98 Bookstore: Buy books, help out THE SCIENCE CLUB

  6/6/98 Added Mysterious Electrostatic Air-threads

  6/2/98 Added Science Museum Exhibits addable database

  6/2/98 Made The Instructions into an addable database

 5/25/98 Added What is Voltage [UNDER CONST.]

 5/22/98 Added Ion Experiments (untried, suggested experiments.)

  5/1/98 Added Anti-spam resources

  5/8/98 Added VandeGraaff Generator Debugging

  5/4/98 Added Edu Newsgroups collected links to Dejanews service

  5/1/98 Added The DISGUSTO-SCOPE, a reprehensible use of innocent optical physics

 4/25/98 Added Mark Rehorst's Building Electrostatic Loudspeakers

 4/25/98 Added SCIENCE DISCUSSIONS to AMATEUR SCI.

  4/1/98 Added The Instructions

  4/3/98 Added a Comment Book to Miscon page

 3/14/98 Figured out Dejanews archive access, added 
         one to Closeminded (see Philosophizin')

 3/11/98 Started MADSCI ANSWERS page, answers I submitted to the 
         "Ask a Scientist" project.

  3/8/98 Started Spin Waves, about a little-known backwater in physics 
         which might explain Psi, also 'free energy' and antigrav reports.

 3/5/98 Started Who's Who in Frontier Physics

 2/25/97 Added more stuff to site FAQ

 2/22/97 Added "Am I just a pedantic science-nitpicker?" to Misconceptions page

 2/21/97 Added Todd Knudtson "Brown's Gas" article

 2/21/97 Added Abhorrant Ideas in Science to Closeminded.

 2/19/97 Added a SEARCHpage, w/sorted list of most popular pages here

 2/14/97 Added PHYSL's Textbook Misconceptions List

 1/31/97 Added NEGATIVE ION GENERATOR to ELECTROSTATIC MOTOR

 1/30/97 Added some explanation to Mechanical Maglev

 1/27/97 Added TRAFFIC WAVES

 1/08/97 Added more to Vandegraaff Explanations (w/GIFs), and a VDG FAQ

 1/04/97 Added Science/Spiritual section to Weird Science

12/01/97 Added Balloon Analogy to Wings Misconception Page

11/30/97 Updated edu.html with Science Lesson Plans links

11/16/97 Added THAT WHICH IS NOT SO...  YET

10/25/97 Added HOW *SHOULD* WE TEACH ELECTRICITY? 

10/12/97 Added KEEPING YOUR BEAD ON THE WIRE to Closeminded Science

10/4/97  Accidental rm of dir. /weird, mostly restored now
        ( any new URL additions to Weird Sci. page were lost)
        I need to build a kicking machine like in coyote/roadrunner,
        to gently remind myself not to use rm *.*

9/15/97  Working on Dry Ice Demos

8/31/97  Started a Free Energy FAQ

8/31/97  Redid Science Misconceptions, added an index.

8/23/97  Added Vortex Cannons

8/21/97  Added Antibubbles!

8/16/97  Added Prometheus Game

8/11/97  Remembered to add here: Crackpot Inventor's Rules

8/11/97  Added Screwy Ideas Archive

7/31/97  Digests at eskimo.com are malfunctioning, including freenrg-digest

7/24/97  Added "Acoustimagnetoelectricism" to Misconceptions page

7/16/97  Added Pseudoscience to Closeminded Sci.

7/14/97  Added Ridiculously sensitive charge detector

7/9/97  Added The Electricity Map

6/28/97  Added Lens vs. Pinhole to Miscons page.

6/16/97  Created Chemistry and magnetism page.

6/8/97  Created ELECTRICITY ARTICLES page

5/22/97 Added They Laughed at the Wright Brothers to Closeminded Science

4/9/97  Added Flowing "static electricity", Enlarged Site FAQ

4/7/97  Added Hum Notes, Hum References, and
        Bristol Hum to the Taos Hum Page

4/5/97   Bill B. on the Laura Lee radio show on alternative science.
         Topic: the "Taos Hum".  Go to TSTRADIO for realaudio archive
        (warning: after free demo time, costs $$)

3/28/97  Added A germ theory of education

3/25/97  Added Heretic's booklist to Closeminded Science

3/15/97  Added Hints for building electrostatic devices

3/15/97  Added a site FAQ.

3/14/97  Enlarged the Seattle Weird Sci. Hobbyists page

3/9/97   Enlarged Sticky Electrostatics

3/5/97   Enlarged the LED explanation article

3/4/97   Enlarged the Hologram Hints page

2/23/97  Added What is a VDG

2/23/97  Added Tornado Chamber

1/17/97  Added Tampere Replication and Test Ideas to Antigravity Page

1/15/97  Added Gravity distortion viewer to Not your average const. project

1/8/97   Added  Audio Absorber to Not your average const. project

12/25/96 Merry X-mass!  Added UFO Binoculars to Not your average const. project

12/15/96 Added Swartz editorial on lift calc. to Bernoulli Misconception page

12/14/96 Added "ice skate" misconception to K-6 Misconceptions page

12/7/96  Created Webpage Flaws page

12/7/96  Created a separate Plasma Sphere page

12/7/96  Extended Sparks & Lightning article

11/30/96 Extended my Homopolar Generator article

11/17/96 Added SPEED OF ELECTRICITY  article to misconceptions page

11/17/96 Started Science Fair Ideas Exchange

10/27/96 Started Airfoil Misconception page

10/26/96 Started small Richard Feynman page for bookmarks

10/18/96 Started SCIENCE EXHIBITS bulletin board (unused, now deleted.)

10/18/96 Started science exhibits discussion WEBHEAD-L

10/16/96 eskimo.com off the net.  Any mail lost?

 9/26/96 Added Maverick versus Conventional Science (to Closeminded Sci.)

 9/25/96 Bill B. on the Laura Lee radio show on alternative science.
         Topic: Science ridicule of new ideas, infectious textbook errors,
         drawing holograms by hand.  Go to TSTRADIO for realaudio
         archive (warning: after free demo time, costs $$)

 9/18/96 Created REPORT YOUR UNUSUAL PHENOMENA subpage

 9/18/96 Created guestbooks for main page, Taos Hum, and kids expt's.

 9/14/96 Created ANTIGRAVITY subpage

 9/13/96 eskimo.com router crash, WWW and mail no work.  Incoming and
         outgoing email vanishes.

 8/31/96 Added SCIENTIFIC CENSORSHIP AND EVOLUTION to 'Closeminded Sci'

 8/31/96 Added THE RESEARCH GAME: RULES to 'Closeminded Sci'

 8/6/96  eskimo.com Listproc is hung up.  No list messages since Sun nite,
         staff fixed it late tuesday nite.  Looks like those messages may
         be lost.

 8/4/96  Connected a Pop Bottle Motor to a bundt-pan Waterdrop Generator
         for the first time.  Igor, IT LIVES!  The motor turns a couple of
         revs and discharges the generator, silently charges up for about
         20 seconds, then repeats.  Things to try: it might be persuaded
         to run continuously by installing 20KV diodes in series with the
         wires to the inducer rings, so that shorting the generator output
         doesn't discharge the rings instantly.

 8/3/96  Added lots of links to the "Asking Science questions" site.

 5/27/96 Created "Ball Lightning" subpage.

 2/7/96 Created Vandegraaf and Static Electricity subpage.

__________________________ LONG AGO _______________________________
3/95    Met Mike Huffman, mad inventor.  Started a temporary majordomo
        list for discussing his device, calling it Vortex-L.

01/95   There aren't any good Tesla Coil pages.  Only fan pages for that
        rock band.  Guess I'll have to make one myself.

12/94   Uploaded some keelynet files called "MRA DEVICE," and spread
        some announcements on various newsgroups.  The resulting flamewar
        on alt.sci.fusion and sci.physics continued for weeks!

8/94    Figured out how to use NCSA MOSAIC freeware.  Created a webpage on
        eskimo called Amateur Science, typed in some old science museum
        ideas, schematics, etc.  Uploaded 10meg of Keelynet files and
        started "Weird Science."  Convinced Yanoff, Virt. Library, and
        some guys on "akebono" to list my page.  Those were the days, huh?

??/93   Heard about a service in Seattle called "Connected dot com" which 
        gave real internet access for only $30 per month (at 2400baud!!!!)  
        I think my addr was billb@connected.com.  Then I noticed that I 
        wasn't getting billed.  And when I missed payments, nothing
        happened!  I contacted other users and found that nobody else was
        receiving bills either.  I later heard that the whole user base 
        at connected.com simply stopped paying.  Then the Sheriff's
        department raided the ISP and shut it down, confiscating all the
        hardware (which apparently was stolen property.)

??/92   Discovered a secret "hole" that gave free internet access.  This
        was a big deal back in 1992. On the BBS card catalog for the 
        Seattle Public Library BBS there was an option for searching 
        periodicals, but the search window was something called "Gopher" 
        which then led off into a vast network of other sites.  After 
        discovering this thing called "Archie", I could find sites that 
        accessed something called "Usenet Newsgroups."   I wasted months 
        searching around in all that stuff.  I REALLY wanted to learn how
        to write my own Gopher pages.  Too bad it didn't have pictures.
        Now that would have been a good idea: hypertext like Gopher was,
        but with graphics!  Why, that would let people publish their own 
        free textbooks.  People could display anything they wanted, and 
        the whole world could come and look at it!  What if billions of
        people could poke around in your filing cabinet?  What would you
        put in it for them to find?

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